Software gripes

this post is fairly ordinary — it's just a rant about some software i've had to deal with today. this morning, i was using my brother's computer when iTunes informed me that there was an update. great. i decided to update it, only to be reminded why i no longer use iTunes — it's bundled with QuickTime. you can get QuickTime by itself, if memory serves me, but you can't get iTunes by itself. shame.

something similar happened today when updating Aptana Studio. i'd installed the basic distro quite all right, then i wanted to update it to get some functionality (Javascript libraries, etc). most everything went smoothly when i only installed functionality for the latest version of the Javascript libraries except YUI and MooTools. i'd install support for the latest supported version, restart Apatana Studio, and it would prompt me again. the problem went away for MooTools when i decided to install support for the older version as well. the problem for YUI is that the download is large, so installing support for older versions will just eat disk space and not give me any returns. sigh.

UPDATE: yes, installing support for versions 2.4 through 2.7 of YUI for Apatana Studio left no more complaints. whoopee.

I envy Python programmers

I've sort of settled with a programming language I generally use, C#. I know other languages too, and sometimes I wish I did more Python programming. Python really simplifies programming. As an example, I coded an application recently that automated pushing form values to a web page. In C# 3.0, the code would look like this:

using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Net;
//...
var formData = new NameValueCollection { { "Var1", "Value1}, {"Var2", "Value2"}};
var webClient = new WebClient();
webClient.UploadValues("http://localhost/localapp.aspx", formData);

In Python 2.X, the code would look like this:

import urllib
#...
formData = urllib.urlencode({ "Var1" : "Value1", "Var2" : "Value2"})
urllib.urlopen("http://localhost/localapp.aspx", formData)

There's no error handling or anything special in this. This example is rather contrived, to be completely fair, but when you add other things like multivariable assignment, and take into consideration Python's standard library, you might understand why I'm envious. Ah well

Remarkable service

Joel Spolsky has an excellent article on customer service. I didn't really think there was much to the article until someone shocked me by doing something like that for me

there are several ORM toolkits for the .NET platform, most notably NHibernate. i came across Habanero sometime back, and i can't remember how, but i tried using it for a project, and found out that the FireStarter tool didn't apparently support Windows authentication for SQL Server. i decided to send them feedback about this, and got an immediate email that my feedback had been received. nothing strange about that. what is remarkable was that i got an email from the Habanero team yesterday detailing some workaround that allowed me use Windows authentication with both Habanero and Firestarter. considering that i'm not a paying customer, i'm really impressed with this. here's a big one for the Habanero team!

I made my first "hit"…I can now retire…(lol)

i've always had an interest in music. not merely as a listener and enjoyer of the audio arts, but i always wanted to make my own tracks. for fun and personal enjoyment. so i have a collection of VST instruments and effects, but i've never really gotten down to making any tracks. same as i've not done any 3D in a while :( anyhow, last night i got to being serious with at least making a 2-instrument track longer than 5 seconds :D so, in all its glory, i present to the world my lastest "hit" and expect those royalties to start coming in anytime soon (but i'm not holding my breath :D)

Get this widget | Track details | eSnips Social DNA

Flop “Date”

it began with a call: “B's taking us to the movies, but insists O comes with a date, so…”. i'm a pretty solo kinda person. i don't really come into contact with people for the most part of the week. we're less than 10 at the office and only two in my area of it, and then i go home where it's just family — i rarely even see, much less talk to the neighbours. my phone rarely rings or beeps outside work hours. it's a life i'm used to — it sucks, but at least i know it.

but this date thing caught me offguard. even though i prepared for it, told my dad i would be having a sleepover, i was still reluctant to go. O called me on the morning, and thought i didn't have her number cause of the way i spoke. at any rate, i stayed late at the office. after waiting for the ladies to show up, we went to see Watchmen at the Palms. first time i ever went to the movies — and of all the movies to see, i just had to go watch Watchmen. as far as i'm concerned, very bad choice (plus some of my popcorn got lifted).

i basically glowered most of the movie, especially after the popcorn was gone. the ladies didn't seem to like it either, since they paid more active attention to me than the movie. i was basically regretting the waste of my time in something i didn't enjoy. i have my own timewasters — but i at least enjoy them. i pushed the feeling that i was the group wet blanket away several times, and did nothing to improve my mood or attitude (yes, i know. sue me — i'm a far more skilled jerk than nice guy). anyhoo, my date complains later that i ignored her. i keep my usual sarcasm in check and basically say nothing. she's basically saying something i already know about me: i suck at relating with humans. odd. because despite my fighting it i remain human.

The Middle Wife

my dad sent this to me, and i felt it was too good to pass up. here y'all go:

I've been teaching now for about fifteen years. I have two kids myself, but the best birth story I know is the one I saw in my own second grade classroom a few years back.

When I was a kid, I loved show-and-tell. So I always have a few sessions with my students. It helps them get over shyness and usually, show-and-tell is pretty tame. Kids bring in pet turtles, model airplanes, pictures of fish they catch, stuff like that. And I never, ever place any boundaries or limitations on them. If they want to lug it in to school and talk about it, they're welcome.

Well, one day this little girl, Erica, a very bright, very outgoing kid, takes her turn and waddles up to the front of the class with a pillow stuffed under her sweater. She holds up a snapshot of an infant. 'This is Luke, my baby brother, and I'm going to tell you about his birthday.'

'First, Mom and Dad made him as a symbol of their love, and then Dad put a seed in my Mom's stomach, and Luke grew in there. He ate for nine months through an umbrella cord.' She's standing there with her hands on the pillow, and I'm trying not to laugh and wishing I had my camcorder with me. The kids are watching her in amazement.

'Then, about two Saturdays ago, my Mom starts saying and going, 'Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh!' Erica puts a hand behind her back and groans. 'She walked around the house for, like an hour, 'Oh, oh, oh!' (Now this kid is doing a hysterical duck walk and groaning.)

'My Dad called the middle wife. She delivers babies, but she doesn't have a sign on the car like the Domino's man. They got my Mom to lie down in bed like this.' (Then Erica lies down with her back against the wall.)

'And then, pop! My Mom had this bag of water she kept in there in case he got thirsty, and it just blew up and spilled all over the bed, like psshh heew!' (This kid has her legs spread with her little hands miming water flowing away. It was too much!)

'Then the middle wife starts saying 'push, push,' and 'breathe, breathe. They started counting, but never even got past ten. Then, all of a sudden, out comes my brother. He was covered in yucky stuff that they all said it was from Mom's play-center, (placenta) so there must be a lot of toys inside there. When he got out, the middle wife spanked him for crawling up in there.'

Then Erica stood up, took a big theatrical bow and returned to her seat. I'm sure I applauded the loudest.. Ever since then, when it's show-and-tell day, I bring my camcorder, just in case another 'Middle Wife' comes along.

Now you have two choices...laugh and close this page or pass this along to someone else to spread the laughs.. I know what I did!!!

Provoking a Blessing

today, i was reminded about what it means to provoke a blessing. normally, the word “provoke” is used in a negative context; but i like what the Free Online Dictionary says: “to give rise to, to evoke; to bring about deliberately”. that's what happened today. i was rushing off to work this morning, and somehow dropped my wallet in the bus i took. there wasn't much money in the wallet, but it did contain my ID cards, some business cards and my ATM card. i was tempted to despair — just how deeply, i'll leave you to guess. but i decided that i'd walk in faith about it and remembered telling God that i give the tithe, and so the devourer is rebuked for my sake. i went back home and dropped my laptop off, then started coming over to work.

when i got to work, i found that someone had called my office saying i'd dropped my wallet. i wasn't sure about calling back since he might have called from a business line. when he didn't call most of the day — and i'd confirmed that he did call from a business line, i was tempted again to despair. i decided to keep trusting God's word instead, regardless of how i felt. i left the office not having heard from the finder. on my way home, my colleague sent me a text saying the guy had called from a business line and i should call him back. i set up a meeting, but it still didn't feel like the guy would return my wallet. after getting home, i waited till the meeting time then. i had mixed feelings — joy that i'd be getting my wallet back, and a temptation that it was just a game. to cut the story short, the person who found my wallet showed up. he was a secondary school kid. i gave him what i could, and wanted to clear off, but i didn't feel satisfied. i decided to pray for him there on the street, but i still didn't feel like i'd “hit” it. it's the second time in less than a week i've had this feeling. this first was when my sister came over when we were out and helped us with cooking and me with my laundry.

when i got home, i was still praying for him. i guess i kind of understand how God felt when Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings to Him. there're just some things you do that make people want to bless you. i experienced God's blessing today, and someone was used by Him, and i felt provoked to share that blessing with him. that's all. except i got my wallet and its contents (complete with the N10 in it :D) without having to go to the police or do any funny stuff. and the wallet came back to me. i couldn't have gone looking for it anyway. coincidence? i think not.

Refactored code...which is better?

this morning, i was editing some code, and Resharper warned me about a possible System.NullReferenceException. i'd been bitten before by this in the same code, but that was because i didn't understand how XmlReader worked then. here is the original code:

MessageDatabase messageDatabase = null;
MessageTable messageTable = null;

while (configReader.Read())
{
  if (configReader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element)
  {
    // ...
    if (configReader.Name == "messagedatabase")
    {
      messageDatabase = new MessageDatabase();
      messageDatabase.Name = 
        configReader.GetAttribute("name");
      MessageDatabases.Add(messageDatabase);
    }
    if (configReader.Name == "messagetable")
    {
       messageTable = new MessageTable();
       messageTable.Name =
        configReader.GetAttribute("name");
       messageDatabase.MessageTables.Add(messageTable);
    }
    if (configReader.Name == "identityfield")
      messageTable.IdentityFieldName =
        configReader.ReadElementString();
    // ...

as you can probably tell, it's supposed to parse an XML file and convert it into a bunch of objects. nothing wrong with that. it takes into account the structure of the XML and makes an assumption based on that, namely, the <messagedatabase> element is always processed before the <messagetable> element, so messageDatabase will be set to an existing MessageDatabase object before any MessageTable instance is created.

a more explicit version of the code is shown below:

while (configReader.Read())
{
  if (configReader.NodeType != XmlNodeType.Element) continue;
  // ...
  if (configReader.Name == "messagedatabase")
  {
    var messageDatabase = new MessageDatabase
    {
      Name = configReader.GetAttribute("name")
    };
    MessageDatabases.Add(messageDatabase);
  }
  if (configReader.Name == "messagetable")
  {
    var index = MessageDatabases.Count - 1;
    var messageTable = new MessageTable
    {
      Name = configReader.GetAttribute("name")
    };
    var currentDb = MessageDatabases[index];
    currentDb.MessageTables.Add(messageTable);
  }
  if (configReader.Name == "identitfyfield")
  {
    var dbIndex = MessageDatabases.Count - 1;
    var currentDb = MessageDatabases[dbIndex];
    var tblIndex = currentDb.MessageTables.Count - 1;
    var currTbl = currentDb.MessageTables[tblIndex];
    currTbl.IdentityField =
      configReader.ReadElementString();
  }

while this is more explicit, the code is simply more. for each property of the MessageTable, i must get the index of the last database and the last table in it, and then set the values accordingly. that plain sucks.

there was one good thing about writing this post: i finally thought about where i could optimize the loop that advances configReader, and added continue statements where they wouldn't cause exceptions. :D

Done in very cleanly by Opera Mini

i had an emergency, and needed to send someone an email. i'd just installed Opera Mini, and decided to acutally use it instead of my phone's default browser. i logged into GMail, opened the mail i wanted to forward, and began forwarding it. i had to attach a file, so i copied it to my phone's memory card and attached it with no hassles. the problem was that every time i clicked 'Send', GMail would belch up an error concerning an invalid email address, which came to something like “/tmp/<gobbledygook>”. i resent this email thrice, to the same effect. Opera Mini is a great mobile browser. but i'm really shaken, as this is my first time using it, and i had this problem. ah well. since my main internet came up, i no longer needed to send the mail (which incidentally, was saved in my 'Drafts' folder).

How I use Python

i love Python. i find it one of the most expressive programming languages i know. It's saved my bacon quite a number of times. for instance, when i generate test data for other applications i write, i generally generate the data (and usually the SQL to insert it into a database) with Python. also, when it comes to sorting data, it's much faster to write scripts to do basic data sorting (as an example, sorting out CDRs from Asterisk) in Python than it is in most languages. today was no exception. i had loads of numbers to send text messages to and i needed to weed out invalid destinations. for the first 50 or so, it was easy enough (but tiresome) to do by hand. when i started to look at just how many, i decided to write a script to help me sort out the numbers. abut 10 minutes later (mostly spent trying to create regular expressions that would do just what i wanted), i was done. and most of the program worked beautifully (well, there were some hiccups. i'm not perfect!)

The value of multiple cores

my laptop uses an AMD Turion 64 processor that clocks in about 1.8GHz. i've always thouht it was a pretty good one — at least until this morning. i've never been faced with the value of multiple-core processors personally as today. what happened is i was trying to get back into design & 3D, so i decided to model & render items i could find around me. so i started modeling this: after modeling and setting up the scene in Blender to render with Indigo, i started a render. almost six and a half hours into the render, it looks like this: then i take the scene to the office and try rendering on a Pentium Dual Core 2.0Ghz. about four and a half hours later, it look like this: obviously the second render is better. and it ran for a shorter time. i'm officially jealous! i want a multiple-core system now! :D

Accessing SQL Server (2005+) databases in .NET Windows services

just a simple quickie here. i completed my application (somewhat...do we ever really complete applications?) - and the service it was meant to configure — then found out that while it ran beautifully in console mode, it just sat there after connecting to the SMPP server. i kept wondering what the problem was. much later i realized that the service was created to run using the local Service account, which is a low-privileged account. as such, it cannot connect using Windows authentication to SQL Server versions that support it. in reality, this is the second time i've faced this issue. at any rate, all i needed to do was change the service to run under the local System account (a highly privileged account) and the problem was solved. another solution would probably be to use SQL Server authentication, which Microsoft doesn't recommend. yet running a service using the local system account is also seen as a bad idea. i guess you'll need to make a tradeoff to solve this problem.

by the way, this is the app i was complaining about. . many thanks to Component Factory for the excellent (and free) Krypton Toolkit.

Weird issue in Visual Studio

i was working on the config application for a service i wrote...but i ran into something really strange:

The Matador

Just now I was having dinner, and the TV was on. We're subscribed to DStv, and while I usually don't watch TV, my computer was busy in the room, so I had to manage until I was done with dinner. M-Net Movies was showing The Matador, and I just happened to watch the scene where Bean (Hope Davis) wakes up and meets Danny (Greg Kinnear) having breakfast. They start kissing and then it gets heavier; Bean asks Danny if he has enough time, Danny already strips to his shorts when he shouts, "Tree!" — and a tree crashes into their kitchen. I could hardly stop laughing. I don't care how hard your hard-on is—a tree crashing where you want to have sex will put a stop to that quickly. No, I didn't stick around to watch the rest of the movie (it's still running now). Oddly enough, while reading about the movie, I found out that Danny asks Bean if she's still horny after the tree crashes. Is he an idiot or what?. Now if I were God...

Baby steps with Mono

Mono is definitely some great software. I downloaded and built Mono on our Asterisk server because it seemed I'd have to develop the application to handle the automated calling on Linux. Not wanting to hurt myself with PHP, Ruby or Python (time frame), I decided to continue using C# and .NET, since I knew enough about Mono to know it is cross-platform. What I wasn't prepared for is just how cross-platform it (and .NET) is. After downloading and building it, I created a "Hello, World" application in it and ran it on the Linux server. I then moved the compiled assembly to my Windows desktop and it ran with the Microsoft .NET framework! After I got home, I built one of my old programs, which had a reference to the excellent FileHelpers library. The library was probably built with Microsoft's tools, but I was able to build (and run) the application using Mono (for Windows).

That's pretty amazing, but the last part is even more amazing. I just tested the Devshock SMPP component (which was definitely built on Windows, using VB.NET), in a program I wrote using Mono on Linux. There's a text on my phone now that proves that .NET is an awesome platform, and Mono is a great cross-platform implementation of that platform. Mono rocks. Period.

Using the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) to make calls in C#

for some reasons, i've been interested in using Asterisk.NET (mostly because code completion in a GUI beats grokking code in a command line). one problem i'd always had, though, was making calls. for some reason, i'd just get the message 'Originate failed' returned to me. today i was working on my sample program again, when i got the same error. i then started looking through the Asterisk.NET code to find out what i could be doing wrong. i also dug out my trusty copy of .NET Reflector to analyze the assembly.

the main source of aggravation was that i could use call files, and they'd work. but with Asterisk.NET, at most i'd get a missed call. my code went something like this:

var myManagerConn = new ManagerConnection();
myManagerConn.Hostname = "asterisk-server";
myManagerConn.Username = "admin";
myManagerConn.Password = "god";
myManagerConn.Port = 5038;
var action = new OriginateAction();
action.Channel = "SIP/3595009";
action.CallerId = "3595009";
action.Context = "robocall";
action.Exten = "10";
action.Priority = 1;

myManagerConn.Login();

myManagerConn.SendAction(action);

myManagerConn.Logoff();

after some sniffing around in Reflector, i found the Timeout property for the OriginateAction class. i went looking in the code, and found that Asterisk would set it to a specific value (30000 milliseconds) if it wasn't set. knowing .NET initialization, however, i guessed that the underlying field was probably set to 0, and set the property explicitly to 30000. i ran the program again, and the call came in, the phone kept ringing (yay!) — but the program generating the call threw an exception complaining about a timeout. i increased the timeout to one minute to no avail. i then decided to set the timeout parameter for the SendAction() method of the Asterisk.NET.Manager.ManagerConnection. the resulting call was like this:

myManagerConn.SendAction(action, 30000);

. and the program worked. like that. so i guess i may just be able to get this automated call thing done without using a terminal to the Asterisk server.

Installing PEAR on Windows

i wanted to install PEAR on my Windows machine as a prelude to installing symfony. i'd installed PEAR before on Windows, no biee. but when i tried using the batch file to install PEAR today, i was greeted with a list of 12 options after deciding to install a system-wide copy. the last option specified C:\\. as the PHP executable path. every time i changed it to C:\\php.exe, i couldn't continue to install PEAR. i had to leave it as-is, install PEAR, then edit the pear.ini file to specify a correct path. ideas, anyone?

Shallow Relationships

as an example of just how shallow my relationships are, i just told my neighbour "Happy New Year". on the 19th. my neighbour. we live in the same building. and have lived every single day of this year in said building. pretty pathetic, don't you think?

where's the cotton-pickin' "Undo" command in real life?

quite a bit has happened since i was here last. for one thing, it's now over 5 years since my mum passed on. and it seems that my dad is "officially moving on" — whatever that means in English. monday i was going home from work, and i saw this really hot (translate: hawt) chick getting out at Obalende. great body, pretty as a flower and had this really nice musical voice (i have no idea what that means either, but it sounds good ;)…and i started thinking about my life.

an ache i hadn't felt in a while came up (though i did the sensible thing and went looking for my next bus instead of gawking), an ache to have someone to hold, to talk to (don't act like you never felt it before! guys really want to have a beaty to rescue!)…and all that. there is no such person in my life. and in the last couple of months, i've been asked (subtly and non-too-subtly) quite a number of times about my "relationshipital" status. no, there's no one either here or on the horizon. so if i really want to hug someone, i'd better grab my pillow. and maybe weep into it. except i'm not that lame. or so i'd like to think. or maybe not. either way, it doesn't really matter since what i do with my pillow doesn't affect the price at which i buy fish in the market.

it's not like i've lacked opportunity to dig trenches and build bridges. at least i'm not in the "women are irritating" phase right now (on the contrary, they're currently interesting — but shall this soon come to pass also? i'm unhurried :D) it's just that for the most part — i get bored (ladies, seriously, it's got nothing to do with you. i easily get "bored" normally. so don't show up at my house with pitchforks, ok? ;), for lack of a better description. maybe they piss me off. maybe i piss them off. i dunno. rare has been the woman who held my attention for 6 weeks or more. i think i broke something. though i can't tell. few and far between are the friends with whom i share my secrets. that's another thing i realized. i've so many shallow relationships, i may just be scared of a real relationship. it's really easy to say, hi, bye. hey sweetie, you're looking good and all that crap, but…i need real relationships. not plastic people with vinyl smiles that are cracked and faded. i'm not even sure where this is coming from. despair? regret? but then, where exactly did i miss it? dunno. maybe this is just a random rant coming from a testosterone overload, but it doesn't matter. since it really doesn't affect the price of fish, anyway.

all said and done, i'll was over it in a couple of hours, then wonder why in the world i posted this anyway. since i wasn't the one who killed Jesus, and i'm not the third leg in humanity. just for fun, i wonder what kind of person would lose sleep thinking about me (ladies, here's an itty bitty cheat sheet: guys want to know you're thinking of them too. really. even though they act tough. guys like me, anyway. unless of course, i'm right and i'm in the minority ;). anyway, enough ranting. off to bed to start what i believe will be a glorious week. why? we two oddballs are going to be spending more time together. and it won't matter that there is no trench in progress. who's the other oddball? naisho da. have a great week!

PS: last year, i needed to do a head scan. i was somewhat excited about it because i believed that i would finally find out what nuts and whatnots were not in place in my head. the result came back…normal. seriously. i had a regular brain like everyone else. not a clockwork one. or an electronic one (might have fried a few circuits). it felt like a letdown. yet another proof that despite my best efforts, ore wa tada no ningen. ah well.

2009!

still here. yep, opened this year rather late, but it's no biggie. 2008 was a great year, and i have high expectations of myself this year. nothing works until you make it work by finding how it should work then putting that knowledge into practice. so go out and make it a great year for yourself. and one more thing: new year resolutions suck. don't bother. just make normal decisions and live by them.

ends and rants

been meaning to mention it for a while now: Hellsing is over. bit of a letdown, that ending. ah well. guess one can't have everything. no, i'm not telling you! go read it yourself. also, watched the last episode of Ga-Rei Zero last night. awesome ending. hope we get to see an anime series released soon. yes, i know i wondered what trashy anime was released when i watched the first two episodes. if it wasn't for someone else, i'd not have bothered watching anymore. boy, am i glad i did complete it.

on a not-so-light note, Chromium lacks print preview - and i'm not the only one missing it. what are the developers thinking? what good is a browser with no print preview (quite a bit, but i'm trying to stress a point here)?

i was thinking recently of the fact that Opera 10 alpha passes the Acid 3 test. great news for web developers and designers, but does that mean Opera will get a larger market share? and how does that translate into cash for Opera? passing the Acid 3 test does not mean that more users — a demographic much larger than the demographic of web designers or developers — will use Opera 10. yet, the fact that Opera 10 passes a test that the more popular browsers fail is a good thing - if you ask me

Kindergarten

Thanks, Dayo for sending this to me

A mom was concerned about her kindergarten son walking to school. He didn't want his mother to walk with him. She wanted to give him the feeling that he had some independence but yet know that he was safe. So she had an idea of how to handle it. She asked a neighbor if she would please follow him to school in the mornings, staying at a distance, so he probably wouldn't notice her.

She said that since she was up early with her toddler anyway, it would be a good way for them to get some exercise as well, so she agreed. The next school day, the neighbor and her little girl set out following behind Timmy as he walked to school with another neighbor girl he knew. She did this for the whole week. As the two walked and chatted, kicking stones and twigs, Timmy's little friend noticed the same lady was following them as she seemed to do every day all week. Finally she said to Timmy, 'Have you noticed that lady following us to school all week? Do you know her?'

Timmy nonchalantly replied, 'Yeah, I know who she is.' The little girl said, 'Well, who is she?' 'That's just Shirley Goodnest,' Timmy replied, 'and her daughter Marcy.' 'Shirley Goodnest? Who the heck is she and why is she following us?' 'Well,' Timmy explained, 'every night my Mom makes me say the 23rd Psalm with my prayers, 'cuz she worries about me so much. And in the Psalm, it says, 'Shirley Goodnest and Marcy shall follow me all the days of my life', so I guess I'll just have to get used to it!'

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you; the Lord lift His countenance upon you, and give you peace.

May Shirley Goodnest and Marcy be with you today and always. I'm sure you smiled! I sure did.

You know your internet sucks…

…when it isn't worth it logging in to Megaupload to download a file for free to cut the waiting time from 45 to 25 seconds. condiments of the seasoning to all.

Updates, updates...

i'm supposed to have moved my focus from the SMS part of my employer's business to IVR. i've had to deal with a flowchart-based development environment i find very annoying. plus, since i had no prior experience with telephony systems, quite a bit is lost on me. i've mostly been fumbling around in the dark.

this morning, my boss called me and asked me if i could develop a voice broadcast application using that environment. since i'd been having problems with it, i said i'd try. since then, i have failed in trying to get the application to make outbound calls. the alternative was to call in a consultant who's very good with Asterisk. i called him, but not after i discovered Asterisk.NET. before long, i had learned a little about the Asterisk Manager Interface and AGI, both of which i never knew existed before today, even though i've played around with Asterisk as part of my job. i also found the Sipek VoIP projects site. hopefully, i'll be able to build the application needed either by using Asterisk.NET or the Sipek SDK. either way, things should work out now.

Python 3.0 is out (i'm a couple days late on this one), and it isn't backward compatible with the 2.X series. looks like they really gave some thought as to where Python should go. i guess that means development of the 2.X series will basically be mostly bugfixes from now on. still, there seems to be a lot to like about the new Python, even though it's slower than 2.6 on the pystone benchmark (i cannot believe they actually took a line from Basic and added the <> operator in Python. thank goodness it's been removed in 3.0!). let's see how things go, especially with open-source projects that use Python. i'm personally wondering where IronPython goes (yes, they did it - got me sold on .NET. doesn't mean i now despise C++ though. i still plan on using it from time to time).

and thanks to Segun who gave me a ride yesterday when i forgot my wallet at home. you're the best, bro!

Looking for a .NET SMPP implementation - Part 2

seems my previous post was somewhat more popular than usual, judging from the two comments i got on it. so, i'm writing this more or less in response to those comments.

my answer is: it depends on a number of factors. what do you want to do? create a client or server? is working with unmanaged code a requirement? what kind of timeline do you have? is reading through code and class diagrams your way of learning, or is it one step above swallowing broken glass? must you absolutely have commercial support? what about licensing? when you look at all these, your mileage will definitely vary. at any rate, below i give some of the things i've picked up about these components. hope it helps!

IP*Works

• You have to pay for it beyond the trial period.
• You get commercial support.
• Since it's a sold product in it's 8th major version, it should have been well-tested in production environments and suited for handling large volumes of SMPP traffic (note the emphasis. it may not have).
• You get other components (well, check out the website yourself).
• You probably don't get licensing issues (note the emphasis again).
• There's an SSL version if you need it.
• They have more than .NET if you need it (but those - except for Java - seem to have stopped in version 6).
• i haven't used it, so i can't tell that you can use the component to develop a server.
• website

RoaminSMPP

• it's licensed under the GNU Library General Public License. as far as i know, that allows you use it in commercial, closed-source applications, but i may be wrong. also, you may not want to use LGPL components. then again, using opensource software may make you feel warm and fuzzy inside.
• the developer says he's stopped development. any bug fixes may have to come from you.
• documentation is in the source code. literally. there's no other source of documentation short of looking up the binary in a tool such as Red Gate .NET Reflector.
• it's free.
• having access to the source may just be the thing for you to tweak it.
• SourceForge project page

Devshock

• it's free.
• it comes with example code. in VB.NET, no less :(
• one of the sample projects seems to be an SMPP server.
• the site was supposed to come up two months ago (in other words, unless someone mirrors the component, you're out of luck! as it stands, i've uploaded a copy here. someone please tell me if it's illegal with proof, and i'll remove the files).
• since the site is down, i cannot state the license (it's not in the downloaded file). you may have licensing issues here too.
• the assembly is not obfuscated in any way, so you can look it up in Reflector and figure out how it was built.
• website (under construction)

ALT.SMS.SmppClient

• it's free. you can purchase the source code, and get commercial support, free updates, and whatnot.
• quite a bit of the assembly is obfuscated (i guess they should really add something in it like, "buy the source, you cheapskate!"). good luck poking around with Reflector.
• there's a forum, so you and everyone else who uses it can decide to discuss it. don't compare that to paid support, though.
• no visible license. that may be a problem.
• website

SMPPLIB

• written in unmanaged code. has a COM library too, so it can easily be used from .NET.
• another item with no explicit license. sigh.
• it's written in C++ and is MFC dependent.
• you only get the source.
• frozen since 2003.
• website

EasySMPP

• no explict license.
• frozen since 2006.
• looks simple enough to use, but i couldn't get it to work :(
• example program included. there's a gateway using it (and as far as i know, it's the only gateway/simulator that seems to work with it).
• free. opensource.
• in case you missed it, it can be used for servers
• SourceForge project page

BasheerG asked if i tested for performance & high load. no i didn't - i didn't have the space to, since i was (mostly) moved from the SMS arm of my employer's concerns. to answer your other question, if i could afford it, i'd go for the IP*Works first, then RoaminSMPP, then Devshock. i've no idea where i'd place the ALT.SMS.SmppClient. maybe lurking around the forum might help me decide. i'd hate to use the SMPPLIB component because of COM issues. and since EasySmpp didn't work effectively for me, i'd not use it. i hope this helps you and Sandip.

my weekend was an ass...wait, that's not right!

phew! what a weekend! Dad was out of town, so it was just my brother& i at home till last night. man, this was the illest weekend so far - as regards tiredness. i can't believe Friday & Saturday i was retiring before 10pm. dude, i really need some downtime - but i'm afraid that may not be till next month.

spent some time designing a website. unfortunately, it seems sticky-footer layouts are mutually exclusive with centered layouts. i can either allow the content pane be centered in browser window, or i can make the footer stick to the bottom of the browser window. so far, i haven't managed to let it do both.

i usually dislike the mass mail i sometimes get, but this one's got something in it so i'll reprduce it here:

One day a farmer's donkey fell down into a well. The animal cried piteously for hours as the farmer tried to figure out what to do. Finally, he decided the animal was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway; it just wasn't worth it to retrieve the donkey. He invited all his neighbors to come over and help him. They all grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey realized what was happening and cried horribly. Then, to everyone's amazement he quieted down. A few shovel loads later, the farmer finally looked down the well. He was astonished at what he saw. With each shovel of dirt that hit his back, the donkey was doing something amazing. He would shake it off and take a step up. As the farmer's neighbors continued to shovel dirt on top of the animal, he would shake it off and take a step up. Pretty soon, everyone was amazed as the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and happily trotted off!

Moral

Life is going to shovel dirt on you, all kinds of dirt.The trick to getting out of the well is to shake it off and take a step up. Each of our troubles is a stepping stone. We can get out of the deepest wells just by not stopping, never giving up! Shake it off and take a step up.

see y'all some other time

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Rhymin' on Facebook chat

was just wording with Legzitano on Facebook chat, and for some crazy reason, the conversation went like this:

Legzie: tryna stash cash
me: in a flash, smoking brown hash, flipping the ash
Legzie: brown hash is trash
cos you may crash
me: word bro...just tryna make that rhyme
Legzie: lol
me: maybe we should dash? grab some mash? what a bash!
Legzie: good, bro!
you sing like Nash
me: omo, battery don dey run down
Legzie: no vex!
ryhming no easy

i'm almost tempted to agree with the guy who said, "Of all the things i lost, it's my mind i miss the most". almost. but not quite.

Animal Farm

yesterday i found out (courtesy of friends on Facebook) about an event that has quite a number of people abuzz: the assault of some civilians on Monday in Victoria Island by naval servicemen, including someone i knew a couple of years ago. in the aftermath, she - and some other person - is suing the Nigerian Navy to the tune of N100m. personally, i think this is both bad & good:

• why would not moving quickly out of the way of a military higher-up be an 'offence'? i'm a citizen - he's a citizen. the fact that we both serve our country in different ways should make no difference. if anything, the fact that i pay taxes which help to fund the machinery that pays him should be accounted for. unfortunately, like Animal Farm, it's become a case of all being equal, but some more equal than others - whatever in the world that means.
• why would an elderly man sit & watch his aides brutalize people with no show of what Shakespeare called 'the milk of human kindness'? i side with Elihu on this one (Job 32:7, the Bible) - whatever the offence, the level of beating & the treatment given her was overkill.
• if the higher-up is in such a hurry, he should at least have found out that there's always traffic in V/I around that time, and scheduled his coming for some other time it was lighter
• i believe his oath on taking a uniform had some variation of 'to protect and to serve'. how are the nation's best interests protected by forcing people to disobey traffic laws just because you have an inflated opinion of your own worth? 'now all i need to push people around is a uniform'. isn't that self-service at the cost of the nation's morals. it's no wonder so many people think a uniform is a shortcut to a plush life. is he - or any other egotistical military personnel - any different from people in public office who rob the nation blind? i definitely am not going to be saying to my kids: 'Rear-Admiral Arogundade? now that's someone worthy of emulation'. in my opinion, he's no different from any two-bit thug.
• it's good that she sought out advice (bad or good) & decided to take civil action. it means that Nigerians are learning that they have rights that can be protected. i'm hoping that there will be some win for moderation and common sense...but the inmates are running the asylum.

i could go on, but let it suffice to say that things don't look too bright. i hope the support of Uzoma and the rest isn't just for show, that we are willing to take bullets for what we believe is right, instead of merely talking about it and 'thanking God' secretly it didn't happen to us. Nigeria is ripe for change, but that change will begin with individual action. when we are true to ourselves first, then to each other, we can change things. until then...we can only hope that the pigs don't make us worse off than the humans, to paraphrase Blair.

Firefox 3 spellchecker vs me

better believe it. i win baby!

Waiting for God

ever heard of Waiting for Godot? you can find out more by clicking the previous link. sometimes, waiting for God can seem like waiting for Godot...it seems He never makes it. i realized why we get tired of waiting for God to show up with something promised: every time we're waiting for God, we're presented with the option of not waiting for Him.

today, some things weren't okay at home, and since i returned from church first, i could either go fix them or wait for my dad and brother to return to get them fixed. one of them was lunch. for some unknown sentimental reason, i was loath to get lunch (i wasn't in a position to cook it) without them being around. so i tried calling. all their phones were unreachable. i was hungry. really. so i waited. then i reached my dad. he said they were on their way. i waited some more. fell asleep. woke up. by this time, as Rudyard Kipling would say, my patience had already gone where dead crabs go. so i fixed myself something to eat. while eating it, i realized that this was the same choice we always have to make when waiting for God.

i can no longer stand with my arms akimbo and accuse Abraham of impatience, for i, too, have been impatient. i looked at the clock ticking, and said to myself, "God(ot) will never show up. looks like it's time to take care of business myself". and like Abraham, only the future can tell what i messed up by "taking care of business". i may not have been promised a son the way he was, but God has promised things in His word that i need/want, and sometimes i took the alternative and stopped trusting God. that's right. that's what happens when you choose the alternative. you pretty much say, "God, time's in your hand and all, but You live outside time. i live in time. and the clock's ticking. i need this thing now.". but what you get from your own efforts can never be compared to what God chooses for you. it may be a long wait, but it's worth it.

Looking for a .NET SMPP implementation

i work for a company that's registered as a WASP (or VASP, not really sure which is the official one now) with Glo, MTN and Zain, and we have a messaging gateway connected to these operators. we have clients we resell SMS credits to, and till rather recently we used the web service on our gateway to link our clients to the gateway.

however, due to certain things, my employer recently added the ability to use SMPP binds to our gateway. i cannot be certain until i check using a tool like Wireshark (geek call-out: any other tools that might make the job easier will be appreciated!), but i think that SMPP will consume less bandwidth than using the web service.

anyway, my boss got me and the other developer on our toes with different APIs that allow us build applications that use the gateway. since we already have working knowledge of how to build applications that use the web service, we were stuck with a COM and a Java component which use a custom protocol to talk to the gateway over TCP/IP, the SDK supplied my the gateway vendor, and different components for using SMPP (if you read my Facebook status message about fiddling with Java, i was trying to learn about a certain Java SMPP API).

since i program mostly in C#, i started looking for some component(s) to allow me use SMPP from my applications. i turned up quite a few:

• A library written in C++ with a COM component that uses it: here
• Easy SMPP
• RoaminSMPP
• The Devshock .NET SMPP component (For some time the site has been under reconstruction and so the files are no longer available from their site.)
• InetLabs's ALT.SMS.SMPPClient class library
• /n software's IP*Works: here

since what i was doing was trying out stuff, buying a component was out of the question. i'm also kinda biased toward open source, so that kinda kicked out IP*Works (don't get me wrong: IP*Works is probably very good - but i just didn't want it. i might try it out some other time). i got the others and started trying each one out, using a local SMPPSim server (SMPPSim is a Java program that emulates an SMPP server. great for trying out SMS appliactions)

Easy SMPP came with a demo application (there's also an SMPP server on SourceForge that uses it), but i couldn't connect to my local SMPPSim server using it (oddly enough, i could connect to the Easy SMPP gateway with it), so that was a no-go. i'll try it again some other time.

The Devshock component came with zero documentation (bad), no sources (i can live with that), and demo applications (client and server) written in Visual Basic.NET (i dislike VB, something that carried over to VB.NET. also, translating a program from VB.NET to C# without an automated tool is not particularly easy, even if you can do it). somehow, i got a demo application working with it Friday, even tested it on our live gateway.

i should have been satisfied, but the Devshock component has gone two years with no updates (which really shouldn't be a problem - the SMS specification is frozen and the SMS Forum shut down). so this weekend, i tried getting the RoaminSMPP component to work (incidentally, it was updated in October, but the author won't be working on it anymore) at home, and i sort of prefer the way it's structured than the Devshock component (it uses event handlers quite a bit instead of return codes and error messages). it does have its bad sides though. it comes with zero documentation and examples. i had to load up my trusty copy of .NET Reflector (one of the greatest .NET tools ever!) and the sources to find out how to use it (also did that with the Devshock binary, but the InetLab one was obfuscated - only one namespace of five was not).

i'm yet to test the InetLab binary - and yes i know: i probably am being an idiot, since i already have one that works (two, to be precise. why knock it?). still, if i'm giving the component to someone else to use, i may need to recommend the one that's simplest to use. anyway, you already got here. go read something else for now. i've nothing more to say here (far too many acronyms, if you ask me) :D. have fun!

Installing Silverlight 2.0 Developer Tools

as you might know, Silverlight 2.0 has been released. as i am wont to do, i went over to the site and downloaded myself the Silverlight 2.0 Developer Tools, which updates Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 and/or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1 to work with the new release. unfortunately, the setup does not include Silverlight 2.0 Developer Runtime, and always attempts to download it (when i tried it on my computer, even when i'd downloaded the Developer Runtime and installed it separately, the install wizard still downloaded the Developer Runtime setup). to forestall this, download them both, unpack the Developer Tools setup into a folder (it's just a self-extracting package - almost any decent archiving utility on Windows can do this, i recommend 7-zip - WinRAR, ZipGenius and TugZip also can - i can't tell if WinZip does), and copy the Developer Runtime setup executable to the same folder. it won't download anything. well, work calls. later!

back at work...

got back to work today. late. it almost took me 2 hours to get to the office this morning. it only took 20 minutes yesterday!

crazy item of the hour: Exception occurred: OutOfMemor (thanks to edcba)

4x4=16

Biyi told me this joke a few days back, and i thought i should share it. there was this guy who bought a jeep with '4x4' on it, and was seeing a lady in a certain area. around there lived a not-so-balanced boy who saw the jeep everyday. one day, he took a stone and scratched '=16' after the '4x4'. later on, the owner came and saw his vehicle defaced. he got it fixed, but the same thing repeated twice. the owner then decided to add the '=16' after the '4x4' himself, and asked the body shop to do it for him. the next time the schoolboy passed the jeep, he saw the new 'equation'. he then took a stone and scratched 'VERY GOOD' and a tick on the jeep.

Fixed-position footer

i've been working (more accurately trying to work) on the TOS Funerals website design so it works well in older browsers, because it degrades horribly in them. for this to work, i needed a technique to force a footer to stay at the bottom of the window whether or not the content filled the window. the first technique i tried was from Boagworld. it worked like a charm - but only in newer browsers (Chrome, Firefox 3, Flock 1.2, IE 7, Opera 9.6, Safari 3/Win). it completely failed in IE 5.5 and 6 (quite unlike the advertisement. my guess is IE 5.5 and 6 don't understand the conditional comments).

so i got my rubber gloves on and tried getting a new technique - once again a Javascript-free method of getting about it. from yesterday's tests, this technique from Dave Woods' blog worked in IE 5.5 and 6, as well as the newer browsers. guess that's what i'll be using for now.

Update: the fault was with me. the Boagworld technique works. quite well, in fact. and it's smaller in both markup and styling.

here it is in Chrome:

Firefox 3:

Internet Explorer 5.5:

Internet Explorer 6:

Internet Explorer 7:

Opera 9.6:

and Safari 3/Win:

Code Geass is over!

i never really wanted to watch Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, because i read about it and found out Lelouch killed his sister. at any rate, someone got me watching it and i have to admit it has an extremely gripping story.

on Saturday, a friend came over and it suddenly struck me that Lelouch was planning his death, and i mentioned as much. there was only one episode of the second season left and it was to be shown yesterday (Sunday). the name "Zero Requiem" had been tossed around and i realized that a requiem is a song for the dead. it was brilliant how Lelouch executed his death. i kind of was hoping for a happy ending, or some romance, but it was not to be. ah well. i guess he really did make everyone happy. in that, he and Suzaku were heroes, but he was the unsung one. great story. hopefully now the twins will give themselves some peace...

bringing you up to date...

so what's been happening in recent times is i got into some serious trouble i had to take care of, so i've only been to work once this month. heheh...you can imagine what that means about blogging — it had to take a back seat. plus i fell ill for over a week. the one good thing about it is i confirmed i'm not fat, since i hardly ate throughout the period and i didn't lose weight :D. no, i'm not back to work, nor am i at home. you can just keep guessing — maybe i got someone pregnant? or killed someone? just keep guessing!

down to what Neo calls geek-stuff: why, oh why must programs install on C:? and why is the install procedure for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express so involved and such a pain in the butt? i don't have Visual Studio Service Pack 1 — so what? SQL Server 2005 Express was about 240MB, 2008 Express is over twice that - and still without Books Online. why would you give me a product that large and not add documentation? i am not always online! arrgh! at the very least, give me a choice of the packages i want to download if you're really interested in helping me conserve bandwidth. i've stopped ranting about Microsoft alone by now, but every company that will supply software over the internet. Thanks if it's free (whichever way), but there are parts of the world where it sometimes seems God turned off the internet. help the people in those areas too...it might be a pain implementing, but if we can choose before we begin the download, it might help some of us who don't know everything about everything...

anyway, i should soon be back home and i can at least update my antivirus program again. later then!

Waiting for God to turn off the internet...

...but while i'm waiting, i'll say hello - it's been a while since i updated this blog last. hiya doing? hope you and all your important people are doing well

now to today's business. i'm writing this post from Google Chrome, which i must admit, looks pretty good, especially for a beta product. however, it's spellchecker doesn't recognize the words "spellchecker", "plugins" or "google" (specifically in lowercase). and i don't know how it will do with plugins like Flash. and even though it's still early days - why can't i customize where the install goes to? huh?

dude, web design isn't for the fainthearted. seriously. i've been working on a redesign of the TOS Funerals website, and it's not exactly been a walk in the park getting the design to work cross-browser. i swear Internet Explorer has some beef with me. first, the content area isn't set off properly as it is in other browsers (even in IE 7 standards mode!), and i've been unable to fix that so far. something else i got fixed was the fact that IE kept drawing a border around my horizontal rule. i had to do two-step hacking: add extra markup and styling. grrrrrrrrrrrr! i've some idea how to go about it now, but i still think it bears mentioning since i haven't actually fixed it: forcing a page to be at least as high is the browser window so the footer "sticks" to the bottom of the window, irrespective of how much content is actually in the page. my own solution saw the footer somewhere in the middle of a long page in IE (again). many thanks to the guys in #css on Freenode for steering me aright - this dude is much obliged. the testsuite for the new design is available at http://www.tosfunerals.com/newsite/testsuite.html (creating this post revealed that Chrome's text selection drag and drop always moves text, irrespective of whether or not you hold down the Control key...sigh!)

Grouse with Facebook

morning. been a while since i last visited. well, i went to Ife and was offline almost all the time i was there. have you noticed that if you make a mistake signing in to Facebook, you hit Escape/stop the page, then try signing in again without refreshing, you can't sign in anymore? why are the Facebook developers using Ajax for the login page? wouldn't a simple submit form have sufficed? and if the Ajax was completely necessary (for instance, some webmail providers encrypt the password at the client's end before the login form even leaves the client), it shouldn't put the page in a state that the page is unusable if the user cancels it. not good, in my opinion.

O/RM and templating

i have a problem. i'm sending text messages to people based on data in a table. but people being who they are, they want to change the message structure at will. and the structure is currently hardcoded. so if i want to make the structure dynamic, i need a template system. i also need to map specific table fields to those template variables, then make the template changeable at runtime. that requires O/RM, so i can map table fields (relational) to objects i create in my code, and all the SQL is generated on my behalf by the O/RM engine. so far, i'm going with ActiveRecord and NVelocity from the Castle Project. i've used NVelocity, so i hope i'll get the same level of success from ActiveRecord (so many dependencies though :)

IQ tests are warped

Warning: shameless plug coming up! i added the IQ test application in Facebook. later on, the Advanced IQ test was recommended, so i added it and took the test. when i completed it, i found out of 15 questions, i only answered 13 and only got 6 right. yet when my IQ was calculated, it was rated over 100 (no, i am not telling you my computed IQ), which is not bad. in fact, it was higher than what was calculated using the regular test. hence my think they are warped. oh, 70 is idiot territory, so i guess i'm okay

Avatar is over!

finally, i've watched all the episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. i have to say that all in all, the series was good. yes, there were some parts that really could have been cut out (like Season 3 Episode 17, The Ember Island Players) or modified, in my opinion, but then that's just my two cents.

stepping into Subversion

i've been joined by two other developers at work, so i needed to give them access to the code i'd written. i saw it as a great opportunity to try out version control, so i gave one of them the task of learning Subversion. he hadn't gone very far with actual implementation, and then my boss put him on something else, so i thought to myself, "what the heck" and started reading about subversion myself tonight. i installed the Collab.Net Subversion server, then TortoiseSVN and began scanning through the book (what? you expect me to actually read it? maybe on your time, not mine. it's past 2am here, for crying out loud).

i set up a repository, checked out, added a new file, tried to commit, then boom! authorization error! now the subversion book didn't say anything about this. so i downloaded HydraIRC, connected to Freenode, and joined #svn and ##csharp and asked. after some time with no answer, i went googling and found that a default repository allows anonymous reads and no writes, especially if you're connecting using svnserve. later on, someone gave me the same answer i got while googling. also got some useful tips, from the channels and the TortoiseSVN manual. in short, if you're going to use Subversion using the svn:// protocol (using svnserve, that is), you're going to need to configure your repository correctly. since it's in the TortoiseSVN manual, i'll refer you Windows users to it. please read Chapter 3, Section 2: Svnserve Based Server. everyone else, please look here for a few tips on configuring your repository for read/write access.

i didn't go with .NET configuration files...and would like your input

i've been working on an application that needs to get some configuration parameters at runtime. at first, i thought of using configuration files, but then i realized that i would need to create another application that would be used to change the config. usually, an application config file is "tied" to the specific executable that it is created for, so - not being comfortable with XML in .NET - and having a tight schedule, i looked into other options. one was the registry and another was a custom config file. right now, i'm using SQLite as my storage medium, with the advantage that i can use the relational model if i need it. obviously, it has some drawbacks, but so far, i've got used to it. let me know what you think - assuming you do think anything.

Rant: why is Opera taking a long time to open Blogger - with no activity whatsoever? it's happened twice already...

The past week in review

hiya. been almost a week since my last post here. ah well. just wanted to bring you up to date with what's going on here, "here" being my life. grrrr. my neighbours decided today to have a party (an all-nighter by the sound of it), meaning there's going to be quite a bit of noise around.

in case i didn't mention it, i was in school last week. saw a couple of the guys, stayed over at Biyi's place while i was there. he seems to be getting along with his final year project and other stuff in his life. i'm happy for him. anyway, while there, i got some anime and have started watching Black Lagoon and Katekyo Hitman Reborn. i've also started Monochrome Factor and almost completed Hayate The Combat Butler. however, the anime series that currently has occupied my time is Code Geass. i started on Saturday and have almost completed season 1. i don't think i'd want someone like Lelouch as my opponent. my current fantasy revolves around a showdown battle of wits between Light Yagami (of Death Note) and Lelouch Lamperouge. sadly, this just reminds me of just how far behind i am with anime. Bleach, Eyeshield 21 and D.Gray-Man are all examples of abandoned anime projects. maybe you now understand one of the reasons i hate my job.

Wednesday: some local government people came around the building where i work and started complaining about the environment. so i don't bore you, they locked me and some other people in the compound. i had to jump over the gate to get out. i heard they later opened the gate - which is good, since almost everyone left in is female. every time i look at my right arm i remember - because i got scratched getting out. fro crying out, it's over 10 years i last did something like that!

Tuesday: i found that Visual Studio's debugger is superior to SharpDevelop's in one respect: if you're debugging applications within the environment, SharpDevelop's only catches uncaught exceptions. So if you're using System.Timers.Timer.Elapsed (for example), you'll never catch any exceptions. Visual Studio's, however, has no such compunctions, and will show exceptions even though the Elapsed event handler suppresses all exceptions. i can tell you that that's what saved my bacon on the current project i'm handling.

Monday: this project is my first experience with Oracle (even though i've had the express edition for almost a year), and if there's one thing i've learnt: always use 4-digit date literals in Oracle, especially if (like me) you're from a MySQL (or other database) background! i spent the whole weekend plus the greater part of Monday wondering what bug in Oracle i uncovered, only to find it wasn't a bug, just an Oracle quirk.

i've a custom class in my application that stores database connection parameters (previously in individual variables) - server, port, username, password and whatnot. since i'm moving to deploying the application solely on SQL Server 2005 Express (maybe PostgreSQL when i have the time to learn it) for now (no thanks to the many quirks of Sybase), i'm now simply hosting a SqlConnectionStringBuilder in the class. you really can't beat KISS.

while i'm still a newbie at regular expressions, i can definitely say they're great when they're used rightly. if i had to write custom code to validate phone numbers, i'd probably have a minimum of 20 lines of code, plus new if clauses (or similar) to write if the networks change. thanks to regexes, i can validate Nigerian GSM numbers - with or without country code - with about 3-4 lines - including creating the System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex objects i want to use. and if i need a new case, i'll just have to change the pattern string. a pity more Nigerian developers don't seem to know about regexes - unless i'm wrong.

i need sleep! 'nuff said.

Working with malware

hi. it's been a long time since i was last here. one month, eh? that's pretty bad. anyway, the point of this post is that i was recently in school, and came across some malware - one of which isn't picked up by any antivirus program i know as at now. this worms spread via USB storage (flash drives, external hard disks and so on). each copies itself to a clean device and also creates an autorun.inf entry in the device if it does not already exist (i can't tell what happens if it already exists). the one detected by AVG 8 Free has an executable named asp.net, and the one that isn't detected as at now has an executable named EXPLORER.EXE.

when i got to school, i had the 'privilege' of cleaning out two of my friends' computers. one was infected by the EXPLORER.EXE worm - which is easier to deal with if you don't have any antivirus installed - and the other was infected with the asp.net worm (if you have an antivirus that detects this, this is much easier to clean than without any antivirus, or one that doesn't detect it). let's start with the first.

normally, a Windows machine has a process called explorer.exe. this process usually serves both as the shell (the program you use to launch applications) and the file manager. the executable for this is located in C:\Windows, has version information that comes from Microsoft, has the 'My Computer' icon and is about 1MB on a Windows XP machine. this worm is about 36kB, has no icon, has the same version information as the legal explorer.exe and runs from C:\Windows\system32. to get rid of this worm, you'll need a couple of applications from Windows Sysinternals, specifically Autoruns and Process Explorer (you can also download the entire suite if you want - it contains both). launch Process Explorer (an excellent task manager for Windows), accept the license agreement if you need to, and kill the EXPLORER.EXE process that doesn't have the My Computer icon and is running from C:\Windows\system32. next, launch Autoruns, allow it finish scanning, then delete the entries containing C:\Windows\system32\EXPLORER.EXE (use Ctrl-F) if you need to search). lastly, get rid of the worm executable itself. open a command prompt, and run attrib -h -r -s C:\Windows\system32\EXPLORER.EXE; del C:\Windows\system32\EXPLORER.EXE. this gets rid of the executable in its default location. your mileage will vary if Windows isn't installed on C:.

the other one is much harder to deal with because it creates a 'non-existent' process, according to Process Explorer. in fact, the process won't even be displayed in the processes list. i had to search for it manually. going through the console to use taskkill with the process id won't work either. so we're going to do it in the reverse flow. first, run Autoruns. search for appearances of asp.net autorunning, and disable, don't delete them. that's because if the worm is still running, it will simply recreate those entries. once you've disabled the entries, you can note the locations of the worm and reboot so you can delete it from all its hiding places (for me it was C:\Windows\system32 and C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSInfo. again, this worm is hidden and probably has a system attribute set, so you need to remove those flags first. i'd personally recommend getting a recent (and decent) virus removal tool to remove this particular nasty, as it not only infects removable drives, but also fixed drives on your computer.

well, hope this is of some use to someone. have fun!

UPDATE: After a couple of days carrying around the EXPLORER.EXE worm on my external hard drive, i found that McAfee picks it up when i connected it to a colleague's computer. as at that time, neither AVG 8 Free nor PC Tools Antivirus was detecting it as a worm.

Windows power schemes

you really can learn something new every day. i recently formatted my laptop a couple of times for a number of reasons - one of them being that i found that my processor was constantly operating at its maximum speed and this was running down its battery seriously. after a new install, i noticed once again that the processor had starting running at its maximum speed again without stepping. i'd just installed WiX, and thought that might be the cause - but WiX doesn't update any system components, so i dismissed the idea (also, i'd installed WiX before and the processor was still stepping then). i'd gotten tired of formatting by then, so i just decided to keep using the laptop and its internal "oven".

this morning, i decided to google power schemes. i then found that for a laptop, power schemes really do matter beyond timing for switching on/off hardware like the monitor and hard disks. get this: they also affect the way the operating system uses the processor. for instance, the difference between "Minimal Power Management" and "Max Battery" is only the timing for turning off the monitor, hard disks, and going into standby - but under the hood, the CPU is allowed to toggle its speed based on demand. there's no difference between "Home/Office Desk" and "Minimal Power Management" when the laptop is on battery. for more information, please look up this article on Orthogonal Thought.

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finally...finished Shounen Onmyouji!

Shounen Onmyouji is an awesome series, in my opinion. the opening song, Egao no Wake is wonderful (here it goes on my phone!), the story was great and flowed very well, and the end is awesome...(mostly). i was wondering what was going to happen in episode 26 when Masahiro kills Touda before the episode goes halfway. somehow, the end is rescued, and we get a believable ending...but why is the ending hinted at? if you - like me - rarely watch the end of an anime episode, you'd never find out that Akiko & Masahiro do go out to see the fireflies. ah well. in all, great series. pity i can't say if there'll be another great season.

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My phones and purpose

as i mentioned, i recently changed phones. i got a Nokia 7500 Prism to replace my 2600. One of the headaches of changing phones is migrating numbers. my SIM was full, and almost the same number of contacts were stored on my 2600. so i looked through my 2600, checking if the number was stored on the phone or on the SIM card, and then recording it in a text file - so i could transfer all my contacts to the new phone. i spent roughly an hour and a half doing this.

i can almost hear you say: fine, but what's this got to do with purpose? please bear with me - i can be a little long-winded when i'm trying to make a point. so i did that, then i put the SIM into my new phone and started using it - but the numbers stored on my old phone were still not on the new one. i went about for a day or so without having access to newer contacts. i then looked through my contacts (after finding out i wanted to contact someone, then seeing i didn't have their contact info), and found my 7500 had a function to move contacts from the SIM to phone memory. i did that, and emptied the SIM. i then checked the 2600 and found it could copy contacts from the phone to the SIM. so i did that too, and then moved all the contacts from the SIM to the 7500. if i'd only read the manual, i'd have saved myself about an hour and a half of typng out names and numbers.

i hope you get my point. some people might have spent another one and a half hours - or more - keying in the numbers into the new phone. but i decided that there was a better way. fortunately for me, i'm not as technically challenged as some folks, so i kind of figured out where to look pretty quickly.

let's imagine the time spent migrating contacts was your life. would you want to spend your life doing unnecessary things just to find out it was all unnecessary at - or after - its end? wouldn't you want your life to count for something? some people spend their whole lives doing things that won't count. there's Someone Who knows - much better than you - what you're meant to be doing. sadly, we usually think we - or worse off, other people - know exactly what we're meant to do. the person who best knows how my 2600 should have been used is its designer. God knows best what you're meant to do with your life. don't waste your life guessing what you're meant to do. ask Him! (James 1:5,6, New Living Translation, paraphrased: If you don't know what God wants you to do, ask Him, and He'll gladly tell you...). i pray you walk this path. life isn't meant to be guesswork.

i got me a new phone, praise God!

i have no idea how it happened, so don't ask me, but this is what happened: i rarely change phones. i'm a strong believer in KISS, so if it can send/receive calls and text messages, it's a phone. even when MTN was giving out free MMS messages, i just had a faint feeling of loss. you know, the kind you get when you "miss" someone you never really knew. so i use my phones. and i rarely replace them. each phone replacement i've got was because the old one was faulty, got stolen or missing, except for the second. i have no idea why, but my parents decided to get myself and my sister new phones then. even the first phone i got was a hand-me-down (which i eventually handed off to someone else).

anyway, after being through about 5 phones in about as many years, my faithful Nokia 2600 developed a quirk. from time to time, it would stop ringing out (even in General mode), until ringing out at all became a very rare occurrence. i merely complained about the phone and didn't try changing it (i'm sure my pocket also had a great deal to do with this :). i was really shocked one morning when Dad, a friend and i were going out, and my dad asked why i didn't pick up his call. i mentioned my phone didn't ring out (dude, forget vibrating - i rarely notice that when i'm about). he gave me some cash to buy a phone. for maybe 2 weeks or so i kept stalling over the phone, which made no sense, because phones are sold less than 30 meters from my office. yesterday, after having a very interesting day, i just got mad and went to buy the phone. i didn't see something i liked in the display case, so i went to the price list. i saw something costing exactly what my dad gave me (no, it's not that much - but it's a sizable chunk of my monthly salary). i don't know why i felt good about the phone. i requested for it, paid for it without knowing jack about it, and went to test it. when the guy who tested it was closing the box, i asked where the USB cable was. He said it wasn't included and it would cost me an additional NGN 2500. i had that much on me, but i wouldn't be able to get home without visiting the cash machine, so i decided not to buy it. after buying the phone, i began feeling guilty, but i shook off the feeling and went home. getting home, i found i really like the new phone, plus, it uses the same cable as my MP3 player, so i really feel blessed! later!

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Blender 2.46 out!

it's coming late, but Blender 2.46 is out, and the Big Buck Bunny movie is also out. personally, i downloaded Blender about a week back, but i haven't really don anything with it, since i'm doing a lot more programming than most anything else. and with the new release returns an old problem: i can't render with YafRay (no, not Yaf(a)Ray) as a plugin in the render window without Blender crashing. ah well. so i had to figure out workarounds - render into the 3d window, use YafRay from XML, or not use YafRay at all;)

So Man Utd finally won...

now maybe i will get some peace! blooming soccer fans! i have no idea what makes soccer so captivating. it really does dey logic. my borther - who's a Man Utd fan - didn't eat until the match was finally over. i guess he realized that whatever happened, the players still don't realize his existence. and that's my problem with Nigerian supporters of foreign teams. don't they realize that for the most part, the players don't know they exist, nor care if they are cheered on by some people they'll never meet? and yet the madness continues. men who are never alive as far as their families are concerned suddenly come alive when there's a meet between "their team" and "the enemy". ridiculous. that's why i insist that football is demonic. the Bank PHB ad about La Liga really puts it in context.

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